This link has been bookmarked by 165 people . It was first bookmarked on 01 May 2006, by Tejas patel.
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03 Oct 14
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corollary
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beam of users.
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hypnotic
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unedifying
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pril 200
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his essa
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he startup
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f anything major is broken-- if the idea's no good, for example, or the founders hate one another-- the stress of getting that first version out will expose it. And if you have such problems you want to find them early.
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he more ideas you implement, the more ideas you'll have.
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You should make your system better at least in some small way every day or two.
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it is also a form of marketing. Users love a site that's constantly improving. In fact, users expect a site to improve.
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They'll like you even better when you improve in response to their comments, because customers are used to companies ignoring them. If you're the rare exception-- a company that actually listens-- you'll generate fanatical loyalty. You won't need to advertise, because your users will do it for you.
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23 May 13
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17 Oct 11
Dave Duarte1. Release Early
2. Keep pumping out the features
3. Make users happy
4. Fear the right things
5. Commitment is a self-fulfilling prophecy
6. There is always room
7. Don't get your hopes up
8. Speed, not Money -
28 Sep 11
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01 Sep 11
Rita ZerrizuelaValuable lessons on entreprenurship
startup entrepreneurship lessons technology paulgraham startups article
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I've learned a trick for determining which points are the counterintuitive ones: they're the ones I have to keep repeating.
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1. Release Early.
The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup: get a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users' reactions.
By "release early" I don't mean you should release something full of bugs, but that you should release something minimal. Users hate bugs, but they don't seem to mind a minimal version 1, if there's more coming soon. -
this is simply the right way to write software, whether for a startup or not.
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I've seen a lot of startups die because they were too slow to release stuff, and none because they were too quick.
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since you don't know your users, it's dangerous to guess what they'll like. Better to release something and let them tell you.
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If they'd waited to release everything at once, they wouldn't have discovered this problem till it was more deeply wired in.
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Even if you had no users, it would still be important to release quickly, because for a startup the initial release acts as a shakedown cruise. If anything major is broken-- if the idea's no good, for example, or the founders hate one another-- the stress of getting that first version out will expose it. And if you have such problems you want to find them early.
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Perhaps the most important reason to release early, though, is that it makes you work harder. When you're working on something that isn't released, problems are intriguing. In something that's out there, problems are alarming. There is a lot more urgency once you release.
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2. Keep Pumping Out Features.
Of course, "release early" has a second component, without which it would be bad advice. If you're going to start with something that doesn't do much, you better improve it fast.
What I find myself repeating is "pump out features." -
This is something all startups should do for as long as they want to be considered startups.
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By "feature" I mean one unit of hacking-- one quantum of making users' lives better.
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improvements beget improvements.
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the more ideas you implement, the more ideas you'll have.
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customers are used to companies ignoring them. If you're the rare exception-- a company that actually listens-- you'll generate fanatical loyalty. You won't need to advertise, because your users will do it for you.
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people get used to how things are. Once a product gets past the stage where it has glaring flaws, you start to get used to it, and gradually whatever features it happens to have become its identity.
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I think the solution is to assume that anything you've made is far short of what it could be.
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If your product seems finished, there are two possible explanations: (a) it is finished, or (b) you lack imagination. Experience suggests (b) is a thousand times more likely.
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3. Make Users Happy.
Improving constantly is an instance of a more general rule: make users happy. -
A startup has to sing for its supper. That's why the successful ones make great things. They have to, or die.
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Users are a fickle wind, but more powerful than any other. If they take you up, no competitor can keep you down.
As a little piece of debris, the rational thing for you to do is not to lie flat, but to curl yourself into a shape the wind will catch. -
The vast majority of people who visit your site will be casual visitors. It's them you have to design your site for. The people who really care will find what they want by themselves.
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There are two things you have to do to make people pause. The most important is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell your site is about.
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A startup should be able to explain in one or two sentences exactly what it does. [4] And not just to users. You need this for everyone: investors, acquirers, partners, reporters, potential employees, and even current employees.
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The other thing I repeat is to give people everything you've got, right away. If you have something impressive, try to put it on the front page, because that's the only one most visitors will see.
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there's a paradox here: the more you push the good stuff toward the front, the more likely visitors are to explore further.
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you tell visitors what your site is about by showing them. One of the standard pieces of advice in fiction writing is "show, don't tell."
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The job of your site is to convert casual visitors into users-- whatever your definition of a user is.
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If you have decent growth, you'll win in the end, no matter how obscure you are now. And if you don't, you need to fix something.
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4. Fear the Right Things.
Another thing I find myself saying a lot is "don't worry." Actually, it's more often "don't worry about this; worry about that instead." -
A lot of startups worry "what if Google builds something like us?" Actually big companies are not the ones you have to worry about-- not even Google.
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What you should fear, as a startup, is not the established players, but other startups you don't know exist yet. They're way more dangerous than Google because, like you, they're cornered animals.
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Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of security. You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing.
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No matter what your idea, there's someone else out there working on the same thing.
That's the downside of it being easier to start a startup: more people are doing it. -
in any case, competitors are not the biggest threat. Way more startups hose themselves than get crushed by competitors. There are a lot of ways to do it, but the three main ones are internal disputes, inertia, and ignoring users. Each is, by itself, enough to kill you. But if I had to pick the worst, it would be ignoring users.
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If you want a recipe for a startup that's going to die, here it is: a couple of founders who have some great idea they know everyone is going to love, and that's what they're going to build, no matter what.
Almost everyone's initial plan is broken. -
You'll find more interesting things by looking at the world than you could ever produce just by thinking.
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5. Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
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The most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence-- determination.
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What students lack in experience they more than make up in dedication.
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You can lose quite a lot in the brains department and it won't kill you. But lose even a little bit in the commitment department, and that will kill you very rapidly.
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In a startup, there's always some disaster happening. So if you're the least bit inclined to find an excuse to quit, there's always one right there.
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if you're determined to stick around, people will pay attention to you, because odds are they'll have to deal with you later.
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both acquirers and investors judge you by your level of commitment.
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What really motivates investors, even big VCs, is not the hope of good returns, but the fear of missing out. [6] So if you make it clear you're going to succeed no matter what, and the only reason you need them is to make it happen a little faster, you're much more likely to get money.
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I carefully chose the word determined rather than stubborn, because stubbornness is a disastrous quality in a startup. You have to be determined, but flexible
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6. There Is Always Room.
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At every point in history, even the darkest bits of the dark ages, people were discovering things that made everyone say "why didn't anyone think of that before?"
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The reason we don't see the opportunities all around us is that we adjust to however things are, and assume that's how things have to be.
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The limit on the number of startups is not the number that can get acquired by Google and Yahoo-- though it seems even that should be unlimited, if the startups were actually worth buying-- but the amount of wealth that can be created. And I don't think there's any limit on that, except cosmological ones.
So for all practical purposes, there is no limit to the number of startups. Startups make wealth, which means they make things people want, and if there's a limit on the number of things people want, we are nowhere near it. -
7. Don't Get Your Hopes Up.
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I think the place to draw the line is between what you expect of yourself, and what you expect of other people. It's ok to be optimistic about what you can do, but assume the worst about machines and other people.
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Shielding your optimism is nowhere more important than with deals. If your startup is doing a deal, just assume it's not going to happen. The VCs who say they're going to invest in you aren't. The company that says they're going to buy you isn't. The big customer who wants to use your system in their whole company won't. Then if things work out you can be pleasantly surprised.
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to prevent them from leaning their company against something that's going to fall over, taking them with it.
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if the other side senses weakness-- if they sense you need this deal-- they will be very tempted to screw you in the details.
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They're trained to take advantage of weakness.
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The only way a startup can have any leverage in a deal is genuinely not to need it. And if you don't believe in a deal, you'll be less likely to depend on it.
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when you hear someone say the words "we want to invest in you" or "we want to acquire you," I want the following phrase to appear automatically in your head: don't get your hopes up. Just continue running your company as if this deal didn't exist.
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The way to succeed in a startup is to focus on the goal of getting lots of users, and keep walking swiftly toward it while investors and acquirers scurry alongside trying to wave money in your face.
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Speed, not Money
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Economically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life.
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As Ben Franklin said, if you love life, don't waste time, because time is what life is made of.
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there's nothing particularly grand about making money. That's not what makes startups worth the trouble. What's important about startups is the speed. By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that.
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[1] Startups can die from releasing something full of bugs, and not fixing them fast enough, but I don't know of any that died from releasing something stable but minimal very early, then promptly improving it.
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I'd say the rate of improvement is more important to users than where you currently are.
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don't make users register to try your site.
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In a typical fund, half the companies fail, most of the rest generate mediocre returns, and one or two "make the fund" by succeeding spectacularly. So if they miss just a few of the most promising opportunities, it could hose the whole fund.
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[8] The reason Y Combinator never negotiates valuations is that we're not professional negotiators, and don't want to turn into them.
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[9] There are two ways to do work you love: (a) to make money, then work on what you love, or (b) to get a job where you get paid to work on stuff you love. In practice the first phases of both consist mostly of unedifying schleps, and in (b) the second phase is less secure.
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07 Aug 10
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24 May 10
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that this is simply the right way to write software
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none because they were too quick
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you won't know your users
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dangerous to guess what they'll like
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let them tell you.
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before the underlying database
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hakedown cruise
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stress
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expose it
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makes you work harder
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improve it fast
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making users' lives better
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the more ideas you implement, the more ideas you'll have
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a form of marketing
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constantly improving
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Users
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their comments
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fanatical loyalty
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Paul Buchheit
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assume that anything you've made is far short of what it could be.
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12 May 10
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30 Nov 09
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28 Oct 09
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The shielding of a reactor is not uniform; the reactor would be useless if it were. It's pierced in a few places to let pipes in. An optimism shield has to be pierced too. I think the place to draw the line is between what you expect of yourself, and what you expect of other people. It's ok to be optimistic about what you can do, but assume the worst about machines and other people.
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27 Oct 09
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11 Jun 09
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01 Jun 09
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03 Feb 09
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I think it's because some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive.
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I think the solution is to assume that anything you've made is far short of what it could be. Force yourself, as a sort of intellectual exercise, to keep thinking of improvements. Ok, sure, what you have is perfect. But if you had to change something, what would it be?
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When you're running a startup you feel like a little bit of debris blown about by powerful winds.
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As a little piece of debris, the rational thing for you to do is not to lie flat, but to curl yourself into a shape the wind will catch.
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As Richard Feynman said, the imagination of nature is greater than the imagination of man. You'll find more interesting things by looking at the world than you could ever produce just by thinking. This principle is very powerful. It's why the best abstract painting still falls short of Leonardo, for example. And it applies to startups too. No idea for a product could ever be so clever as the ones you can discover by smashing a beam of prototypes into a beam of users.
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5. Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
I now have enough experience with startups to be able to say what the most important quality is in a startup founder, and it's not what you might think. The most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence-- determination. -
You can lose quite a lot in the brains department and it won't kill you. But lose even a little bit in the commitment department, and that will kill you very rapidly.
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But if you lack commitment, chances are it will have been hurting you long before you actually quit. Everyone who deals with startups knows how important commitment is, so if they sense you're ambivalent, they won't give you much attention. If you lack commitment, you'll just find that for some mysterious reason good things happen to your competitors but not to you. If you lack commitment, it will seem to you that you're unlucky.
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You have to be the right kind of determined, though. I carefully chose the word determined rather than stubborn, because stubbornness is a disastrous quality in a startup. You have to be determined, but flexible, like a running back. A successful running back doesn't just put his head down and try to run through people. He improvises: if someone appears in front of him, he runs around them; if someone tries to grab him, he spins out of their grip; he'll even run in the wrong direction briefly if that will help. The one thing he'll never do is stand still.
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As Ben Franklin said, if you love life, don't waste time, because time is what life is made of.
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05 Dec 08
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29 Nov 08
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Wufoo took this to heart and released their form-builder before the underlying database. You can't even drive the thing yet, but 83,000 people came to sit in the driver's seat and hold the steering wheel. And Wufoo got valuable feedback from it: Linux users complained they used too much Flash, so they rewrote their software not to. If they'd waited to release everything at once, they wouldn't have discovered this problem till it was more deeply wired in. -
So it is with hacking: the more ideas you implement, the more ideas you'll have.
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You should make your system better at least in some small way every day or two.
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When you're running a startup you feel like a little bit of debris blown about by powerful winds. The most powerful wind is users. They can either catch you and loft you up into the sky, as they did with Google, or leave you flat on the pavement, as they do with most startups. Users are a fickle wind, but more powerful than any other. If they take you up, no competitor can keep you down.
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I like the wind metaphor because it reminds you how impersonal the stream of traffic is. The vast majority of people who visit your site will be casual visitors. It's them you have to design your site for. The people who really care will find what they want by themselves.
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There are two things you have to do to make people pause. The most important is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell your site is about.
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The other thing I repeat is to give people everything you've got, right away. If you have something impressive, try to put it on the front page, because that's the only one most visitors will see.
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In the best case these two suggestions get combined: you tell visitors what your site is about by showing them. One of the standard pieces of advice in fiction writing is "show, don't tell." Don't say that a character's angry; have him grind his teeth, or break his pencil in half. Nothing will explain what your site does so well as using it.
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Almost everyone's initial plan is broken. If companies stuck to their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling programming languages, and Apple would be selling printed circuit boards. In both cases their customers told them what their business should be-- and they were smart enough to listen.
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As Richard Feynman said, the imagination of nature is greater than the imagination of man. You'll find more interesting things by looking at the world than you could ever produce just by thinking. This principle is very powerful. It's why the best abstract painting still falls short of Leonardo, for example. And it applies to startups too. No idea for a product could ever be so clever as the ones you can discover by smashing a beam of prototypes into a beam of users.
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Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google were all founded by people who dropped out of school to do it.
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Running a startup is like walking on your hands: it's possible, but it requires extraordinary effort. If an ordinary employee were asked to do the things a startup founder has to, he'd be very indignant. Imagine if you were hired at some big company, and in addition to writing software ten times faster than you'd ever had to before, they expected you to answer support calls, administer the servers, design the web site, cold-call customers, find the company office space, and go out and get everyone lunch.
And to do all this not in the calm, womb-like atmosphere of a big company, but against a backdrop of constant disasters. That's the part that really demands determination. In a startup, there's always some disaster happening. So if you're the least bit inclined to find an excuse to quit, there's always one right there. -
At Y Combinator we sometimes mistakenly fund teams who have the attitude that they're going to give this startup thing a shot for three months, and if something great happens, they'll stick with it-- "something great" meaning either that someone wants to buy them or invest millions of dollars in them. But if this is your attitude, "something great" is very unlikely to happen to you, because both acquirers and investors judge you by your level of commitment.
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What really motivates investors, even big VCs, is not the hope of good returns, but the fear of missing out. [6] So if you make it clear you're going to succeed no matter what, and the only reason you need them is to make it happen a little faster, you're much more likely to get money.
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Shielding your optimism is nowhere more important than with deals. If your startup is doing a deal, just assume it's not going to happen. The VCs who say they're going to invest in you aren't. The company that says they're going to buy you isn't. The big customer who wants to use your system in their whole company won't. Then if things work out you can be pleasantly surprised.
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The way to succeed in a startup is to focus on the goal of getting lots of users, and keep walking swiftly toward it while investors and acquirers scurry alongside trying to wave money in your face.
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Similarly, don't make users register to try your site. Maybe what you have is so valuable that visitors should gladly register to get at it. But they've been trained to expect the opposite. Most of the things they've tried on the web have sucked-- and probably especially those that made them register.
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Andy BrudtkuhlThe startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others. I think it's because some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive. We've now invested in enough companies that I've learned a trick for
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Fogday StudiosThe startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others. I think it's because some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive.
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05 May 06
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04 May 06
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jeanjordaanThe startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others. I think it's because some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive. We've now invested in enough companies that I've learned a trick for
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03 May 06
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02 May 06
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Starting a Business
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Thomas Vander WalPaul Graham's presentation from the Start-up School
advice article business code company development entrepreneur entrepreneurship finance internet paulgraham worklife wisdom webdesign work web vc technology startup project programming productivity usability software webapp webdev
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01 May 06
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Dhul Qarnaynbarreras a superar par crear una startup
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davidkatoThe startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others. I think it's because some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive.
business ideas technology work startup entrepreneur entrepreneurship
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